As arguably the first Postmodern building designed on a monumental, commercial
scale, the AT&T Building (completed in 1984 by Philip Johnson) generated sufficient
popular interest to be front-page news in the New York Times on 31 March 1978 and the cover story in Time
on 8 January 1979, which portrayed the architect Philip Johnson cradling a model of the
proposed design. In legitimizing Postmodern style and ideas, it reversed almost three
decades of modern principles espoused by Mies van der Rohe that Johnson himself had
practiced with the master in the Seagram Building (1958). Gone are the open plaza (the
externalization of universal space); the understated, monochromatic, almost mute metaland-
glass curtain wall; and the nonconformist, neo-Baroque setback from the avenue.
Instead, Johnson’s building presses directly against the site line along the entire block of
Madison Avenue between East 55th and East 56th Streets and introduces a newer type of
urban amenity: a glass-canopied atrium with retail establishments. Several similarities to
the Seagram Building remain, however, in the deeply recessed ground-story lobbies,
overall floor plans, and steel construction. In fact, the plan is typical of postwar high-rise
office buildings, comprising a sizable service core of elevators, emergency stairwells, and
rest rooms, with resultant narrow office spaces.
Discussions for the design began in the mid-1970s with AT&T, ironically one of the
world’s largest corporations before its divestiture only shortly after the erection of the
building. At a cost of $200 million, the 648-foot-high, 37-story building dedicated ten of
its stories to its eponymous corporation, with the remaining rented as general office
floors.
Its two central Postmodern features are the selection of a masonry enclosure, a light
pink granite, and the addition of a crowning broken pediment. The latter feature fueled
the nickname the “Chippendale” skyscraper, presumably because of its association with
Thomas Chippendale’s highboy chest-on-chests rather than with its actual but much rarer
architectural source in 18th-century Georgian entrances. Because of the density of the
location, the pedestrian experiences the building at two scales: from the street, the
ground-level arcades, and from a considerable distance, the signature broken pediment.
Originally, the ground level of the tower comprised open arcades around
the small entrance lobby and service core. The unenclosed public space
beneath the tower, compared to an Egyptian hypostyle hall by one
historian, was intended to mitigate the intensive use of the site and to
repay the absence of setbacks in the tower. At the rear of the site, a glasscanopied
galleria in the spirit of Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele
(1867) contains a three-story row of shops.
AT&T Building showing Chippendale detail, designed by
Phillip Johnson and John Burgee (1984)
A quarter of a barrel vault, the
canopy is supported by quarter-round arches, not unlike the Romanesque tunnel-vaulted nave of St.-Sernin (1100) in Toulouse, France.
Concentric diamond and chevron patterns animate the granite floors. In 1994 Gwathmey
Siegel and Associates, in an effort to respond to criticism of insufficiently sheltered
public spaces, enclosed both the public arcades beneath the tower and the galleria, which
was extended into one bay on either side of the elevator core. By creating deep shadows,
Gwathmey Siegel’s bay windows for storefronts retain the feeling of depth in the arcade
openings.
The most tactile experience occurs at the street level, where the flame-finished pale
pink Stony Creek granite cladding meets the ground. Above substantial square column
bases rise piers with reentrant corners, and quarter pyramids mark this articulation.
Johnson has claimed that the entrance composition, with its central arch flanked by
narrower trabeated openings, recalled Filippo Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel (1429) at
Santa Croce, Florence, although critics did not hold both in equal esteem. Following the
rhythm of openings established at the ground level, uninterrupted vertical bays contain
granite mullions between piers, anchored underneath to steel tubes and originally
intended to be round sectioned. Cost containment prevented the materialization of this
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feature, and in combination with the insufficient suppression of windows into the wall,
AT&T’s resultant thinness has been a frequent source of criticism, which compared the
building unfavorably with Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright Building (1891) in St. Louis,
Missouri, admired for the expressive qualities of its brick masonry and molded terracotta.
More successful, however, are the upper-level executive floors, where deeper
suppression of the glazing and round-sectioned mullions were realized. Also lamented
were the bare expanses of granite between the entrance arcade and the office floors as
well as between the upper-level executive office floors and the sloping edges of the
pediment, the subtle cornice of which, however, was praised.
At the main entrance, a suppressed glazed entrance arch, with an oculus
above, echoes the narrow 116-foot central arch. Lavish detailing of the
material includes a diamond pattern, or opus reticulatum, in the apron around the openings
and fully threedimensional articulated moldings around the arch and in
corners. Capped with a gilded cross vault that springs from corner
brackets, the compact but well-proportioned 65-foot-tall lobby has a
black-and-white marble floor pattern recalling Durbar Hall (1931) at the
Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, India, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens.
Lined with granite walls as well, the lobby precedes a barrel-vaulted
elevator hall; columns with abstracted Byzantine capitals demarcate the
two spaces. Among the renovations supervised by Gwathmey Siegel and
Associates, black glass replaced the diamond-patterned granite in the blind
lobby arches. Bronze elevator doors, set in a blind arcade, repeat the
arched forms. The regilded sculpture Genius of Electricity (1916), by Evelyn Beatrice
Longman, known popularly as Golden Boy, from the top of the earlier headquarters,
was replaced, after the Sony Corporation purchased the building, by an
untitled nonobjective Joel Shapiro (1941-) sculpture.
Called the “sky lobby,” the main reception area sits one level above ground behind the
entrance oculus. Its veined Breccia Strazzema marble forms a central aedicule enclosed
by halfround arches springing from linteled openings. Gwathmey Siegel and Associates
softened surfaces with wood panels, black glass, and murals. In the middle section of the
building, there are 27 standard office floors, with ten-foot heights, and the executive
offices occupy the 33rd and 34th floors. In them, Johnson specified molded wood panels
and a double grand staircase connecting the two levels. Ventilation is diffused between
vinyl-clad metal acoustical ceiling panels, and task lighting illuminates each workstation.
Considered flamboyant and arbitrary by some, frivolous and stylistically promiscuous
by others, the building design generated ample criticism. Its historical references, reduced
to two dimensions, were said to lack symbolic weight. Still, in its superficial use of the
grammar of architecture, the AT&T Building expresses a perhaps unconscious camp
quality, and as an object of the resentment of Postmodernism for its esoteric references
and ad hoc assembly of historical images, AT&T represents at the same time the
overthrow of orthodox modernism.
